Trump still not in power.

I hoped and expected that Trump would be in power by now, and observed that this would feel like a coup, and would require measures that resemble a coup.

CNN complains “Trump goes rogue” and complains that Trump is fighting for control of the presidency.

Now he is fighting for control of the presidency?

During the weekend, he issued a demand to end the great replacement, which has continued during his presidency.

Giving effect to these demands would require open political conflict with the Republican party, and open armed conflict with the permanent government.

If he yields, he will be a one term president, and the Republicans, to their immense relief, will be voted out in 2018 and 2020, giving them excuses for not implementing the policy that they run on in elections.

On his performance since the election, and the precedent of every president since Roosevelt, he will yield.

But he is Trump.

To win, he has to bring the White House into line, and then get heavily involved in a bunch of primary fights to remove Republican Party cucks in 2017.  Which so far he has not been doing.  He has been trying to make a deal with the establishment, a deal consistent with him remaining sufficiently faithful to his base to win re-election, and the establishment just is not having any.

Events so far have been consistent with the Moldbuggian view that elections and all that are as relevant as Queen Elizabeth going in a stagecoach to open the British Parliament.  The Permanent Government runs the country day to day, Harvard sets policy, and the American Law Institute, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard, legislates.

Indeed CNN implicitly endorsed the Moldbuggian view, by complaining that the country has two foreign policies, one set by the State Department and the Defense Department, and Trump’s policy – with the clear implication that Trump should butt out and stick to robotically signing State Department policy.

The trouble with CNN’s solution, however, is that the State Department and the Defense Department do not have one foreign policy, but a hundred, with the result that their foreign proxies are always shooting at each other, and from time to time shooting at US troops and diplomats.  Without a president in charge, they are institutionally incapable of acting as one.  The Cathedral has not solved the institutional and organizational problem of acting as one without delegating all power through a single chief executive officer.  They are not agreement capable.

And, not being agreement capable, they are incapable of making a deal with Trump.

Trump is a deal maker.  But now he is in a situation where deals are just not possible.  He has to fight and possibly be utterly defeated, or fail to fight and quite certainly be utterly defeated, fail to fight and be a lame duck for his entire single term, and then ignominiously lose the election in a landslide.

His attempts to cut a deal have alienated his base, and show absolutely no sign of producing a deal.  He is dealing with a group of people institutionally incapable of making a deal.  The accusation that Trump is intransigent is pure projection.  Social Justice Warriors always project. Trump is alarmingly ready to compromise, but can find no one to compromise with.   Winning will require measures that have been unthinkable – yet Tony Abbot and Duterte were willing to deploy such measures.  I thought, therefore, Trump would be willing to deploy such measures.  So far, however, he has yielded.  Trump is a deal maker.  He is going to have to be a general.  He is going to have to seize the power of the presidency, or be a one term president as he takes the blame for Harvard’s policy of electing a new people.

30 Responses to “Trump still not in power.”

  1. Contaminated NEET says:


    Wait a minute… Be a lame duck and lose the next election? I thought they were going to guillotine Trump and his whole family. What happened to that?

    • jim says:

      If he fails to fight, guillotining may be delayed.

      CNN in effect said that if he stopped trying to rule, and was content with reigning, they would go easy on him.

      They want to maintain the illusion that whites have voted to be replaced, and are voluntarily ceasing to reproduce. His cooperation would help to sustain that illusion, and if he were to cooperate, executing him would break the illusion.

      • ilkarnal says:

        If they prosecuted Trump and Trump Jr. ruined their fortunes and their name and sent them to prison for a decent period of time, that would be much better, much more congruent with the image and narrative they want to push. The guillotining thing is crazy. Antifa is not going to spring into power.

        • jim says:

          The left is incohesive. It is not capable of doing what is in its rational best interests.

          The historic trend is that the moderate left empowers the extreme left to destroy their enemies, and then the extreme left destroys the moderate left. ACLU gets the same treatment as Milo from the BLM. The radicals are devouring the moderates.

          The Kadets wanted constitutional democracy, overthrew the Czar. The social democrats overthrew the Kadets, removed the Czar. Then discovered that the public were not ready for that, and their pretense of democracy fell apart. Then the Communists overthrew the social democrats.

          There actually is not anyone steering the ship.

          • TBeholder says:

            The “left” are puppets. Again.
            For steering the ship, there’s the usual band – IMF, UN, Soros and the rest of the International.
            But they have lost control at least partially, too. It looks like they tried to move faster, were unsatisfied with roundabout control via “legitimate” oligarchy and allowed the puppets to abandon the old good shell game facade. And were hiring psychopaths – those are good at short-term scams and better as scapegoats.
            Now they discover that riding a pack of rabid dogs is even trickier than riding a single tiger. While the oligarchy and shell game are already too compromised for return to Mostly Business As Usual (in USA it could be via e.g. second Patriot Act).
            Maybe there’s some infighting too? What if some of the puppeteers let Trump win and didn’t bother to tell Soros, because they began to think this crude fast game is overextending and overexposing, thus Soros and his minions are marked as loose cannons?
            Now it’s win-win for them: if Soros wins, it will cost him much and he could become less independent, and if the pussyhats are purged by others, it would cull the uncontrollable pawns, while a loud ugly squabble not only weakens the opposition, but distracts from the rest of Cathedral/International/whatever, who get to play old good “divide et impera” some more.

            • Cavalier says:

              The IMF, the UN, and Soros all strike me as puppets. More likely, the CIA, the State Department, or even the NSA.

              Hard to say, though. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter that much to us peons.

              • glosoli says:

                Go read some of Miles W Mathis’s papers. Look back through history, it’s the wealthy pulling the strings.

                It goes back to the time of William the Conqueror.

                Nothing new, they ride the cycles, up and down, very little you see or read is true, most of it is propaganda.

                A depressing conclusion is reached, but at the same time it’s liberating, and if you’re a Christian like me, you care about other things than power and politics and money.

                • Cavalier says:

                  You know, it’s probably most accurate to say that all of these formal institutions are not much more than puppets of an informal power.

                  I’ll read the papers.

        • BomberCommand says:


          If they do that they’ll soon have armed people in front of the jail demanding Trump’s release. So they’ll either have to release him or they’ll kill him.

          • jim says:

            Which is approximately what happened when they detained the Czar.

            • Mackus says:

              Do you have any source on popular opposition to removal of tsar?

              • jim says:

                That is just my interpretation of political outcomes – the revolutionaries were not doing too well in the elections before the revolution, and despite seizing power in the name of democracy, showed absolutely no inclination to legitimize their seizure of power by genuinely democratic elections, but every academic will swear on a stack of bibles that they were extremely popular and all the previous elections were extremely unfair.

                • lalit says:

                  Yes, I always wondered, why executed the Czar in such an apparent hurry instead of putting him on a trial in a kangaroo court, finding him guilty of all crimes and more and then publicly executing him.

          • Filthy Liar says:

            Why not just kill the people demanding his release?

            • jim says:

              The people seeking to rescue the Czar intended to do so by sudden and terrible violence, which is the only way that would have worked.

              • Filthy Liar says:

                Seems easier to kill the militia, at least in Trump’s case. I mean really, how many people are going to be willing to die for a deposed God-King? Trump’s adherents only adhere while he’s winning, I suspect.

                • jim says:

                  He had plenty of adherents when everyone, except a few like myself, said he was absolutely certain to lose.

                  We shall see how many adherents the left has when the arc of history starts to bend the wrong way.

                • Mackus says:

                  If Trump gets imprisoned by blatantly illegal means, he legally speaking remains POTUS, while simultaneously becoming symbol, a Schelling point.
                  Rescuing him will be too big of a blow to deep state for enemies of deep state to ignore. Whether you like him or not, you’d attempt to save him just to screw with deep state.

                • peppermint says:

                  Mackus is right, I want the heads of every cianigger and professor and the only reason I’m not spouting doom and gloom all the time is His Majesty promised me what our people really need instead.

              • Mackus says:

                Yup. Czechoslovak Legion was mere days away, and Bolsheviks couldn’t risk that someone would help tsar escape while they evacuated him to Moscow for “proper” trial.

  2. ilkarnal says:

    I’m interested in your thoughts on what to do, should this slow capitulation continue. What next?

    • Inquiring Mind says:

      Now Jim is coming around to that view.

      OK, OK, no one here ever liked “W” and the “neo-cons” and the Iraq War, but the current situation has an Iraq War analogy.

      The Narrative goes that we were promised by the neo-cons a short war, that the indigs would greet US soldiers and Marines by putting flower buds into their rifle barrels and that with Iraq’s oil and payment of the debt that Saddam racked up, the War would pay for itself. Maybe that promise was never made quite that way, but you get the idea.

      So the Iraq Insurgency was a surprise? To me it wasn’t, and I don’t mean in a chairborne/snarky I-told-you-so-way. When our tanks crossed the sand berm, it was fully my expectation that this thing could be a lot harder than some were telling us, and I would have been surprised if there weren’t an Insurgency. First of all, that is what people do over there when they are bored. Second, the entire rationale advanced for the Iraq War was that there was not just Al Qaeda, which I guess was a kind of franchise setup, but there is this vast America (The Great Satan) hating enterprise out there described in Tom Clancy’s Sum of all Fears, of which Iraq, Al Qaeda and even Islam itself were only players. American entry into Iraq would draw them into Iraq where we would fight them.

      It was called the Flypaper Theory, much as there had been the Domino Theory behind the Vietnam War. Yeah, yeah, it was offered as an explanation as to why we were in an Iraq quagmire after-the-fact of the Insurgency ramping up, but you get the idea.

      Please don’t argue with me about the Iraq War — I am only presenting this as an analogy to the Trump Presidency. Voting in Mr. Trump was crossing the sand berm. Confirming Justice Gorsuch was pulling down Saddam’s statue in Baghdad. Firing Mr. Comey was like locating Saddam in his spider hole. After that, this is going to be a long, hard, slog.

      But we knew that going into this, didn’t we? Moldbug was telling us to not cross the berm through the electoral process, that we should wait for the whole thing to collapse or some such thing?

      If what is taking place is a Cultural Civil War, wars are long, hard, messy, discouraging affairs — they are never “surgical”, “Shock and Awe” is a Media Meme. So, soldiers, buck up and stop complaining.

    • jim says:

      If Trump cucks out, he will be Nixoned. If he does not cuck out, they will attempt to Nixon him. “It is not the original crime, it is the cover up” – where the “cover up” is that they were unsuccessful in proving stuff that they supposedly know is true.

      If Trump loses, it is back to the Moldbug program: Delegitimize democracy, don’t get in frontal battles with the state, wait for our enemies to self destruct and devour each other.

  3. Inquiring Mind says:

    To continue the war analogy, in battle there is a Direct Approach where you march right up to the army opposing you and start fighting them, hoping to use either overwhelming numbers, superior weapons, better training, better motivated warriors, Divine Providence or just plain luck to prevail. Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg is a famous example where those factors just didn’t break General Pickett’s way.

    Then there is the Indirect Approach. An Indirect Approach can be anything from sneaking up behind the enemy to the chess game of marching your soldiers to where the enemy ain’t. It can even be a frontal assault where you “read the terrain” and us “concealed avenues of approach.” You know about Passing and No Passing zones on a two-lane highway? Even in seemingly flat land there are rises where oncoming traffic is hidden on the reverse slope of that hill, and a good infantry commander can find those No Passing zones without them being marked with a solid yellow stripe to close with an objective without the enemy shooting back.

    Maybe the DACA affair is such an Indirect Approach, I am hoping it is an Indirect Approach, if it is not an Indirect Approach then even I shall start to worry. People were countering Trump Criticism by claiming Mr. Trump was playing 3-dimensional chess — yeah, yeah, people are snarking that he is playing 17-dimensional chess, but the Indirect Approach is not nearly that complicated.

    Mr. Trump announces that DACA as an Executive Order (will become) history, but in Sun Tsu fashion leaves the opposition an escape route — Congress will decide (as indeed is its Constitutional role).

    At first the Media laid down a sob-story barrage, but then Mr. Trump had his meeting with Stalin, er, I mean Schumer. A “deal on DACA” was in the works.

    But what does a “deal” entail — your side gets something you want, my side gets something we want. That was always the “deal” on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, in exchange for some form of amnesty for the illegal people already here, who are so integrated into American Society that it would be a war crime to send them home, we enact some manner of better border enforcement going forward. Yeah, yeah, Gang of Eight, a setup, Amnesty Now for vague future promises that we really mean it now and now future amnesty?

    That is why “deal with DACA” instead of the whole massive thing. To probe the oppositions strengths and weaknesses? So in response to the offer to make some kind of DACA permanent through legislation, we have the “activist” community howling (mugir ces feroce soldats!) Yes DACA, No Wall!

    What part of a “deal” do the activists not understand? Amnesty in trade for some kind of better border enforcement has always, always been the deal, even if it had been a fig-leaf deal, a sham deal. A “clean DACA bill”? What is Nancy Pelosi smoking? Maybe this is what Mr. Obama meant along by his “no longer politics as usual” that since forever was based on deal-making? Maybe Mr. Obama’s politics was that his personal charisma would cast deals aside and “do policy the right way”, you know, like Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela?

    Now that a “deal” is in the making, Mr. Trump is drawing up what he wants, have you noticed that the sob-story barrage has been dialed down (for the moment)? I mean, if the 750,000 stories of sobbing people tightly integrated into American society were so existential, do you think that at least something, anything at all would be offered for this? “A Clean DACA bill” is a dream come true, people, that is, unless and until Mr. Trump signs such a thing. At that point, I will start studying Hungarian. Jo napot!

    • jim says:

      Trump’s moves on DACA were interpreted by many as cucking out. Now they look like 3D chess.

  4. Theshadowedknight says:

    This is coming to a fight. No way around it. The God-Emperor was nothing more than battlespace preparation. The more that he does for us now, the better our position when the shooting starts for real, but he is not truly our ally. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more no less. He is only an ally of convenience, and he does not understand the deadly serious fight in which he finds himself.

    Although, I have another interpretation of what is unfolding. It is possible that he understands, but Sessions fucked up his plans. Sessions was supposed to be a hard-charging ass-kicker, and he folded like a cheap suit on the Russia probe. Trump wanted a Grant or a Patton of lawyers, and he got a McClellan instead. That changes the situation drastically, given that he has to first fight the rule of judges through the system before he can declare them out of control and ignore them. He needs an aggressive Attorney General, and Sessions is too genteel, noble, and polite. He does not possess the ruthlessness necessary to crush the power of the legal system.

    Not sure which is which, but it is something. The sons seem to have a better idea of what is going on, so we shall see how they turn out.

    The Shadowed Knight

    • jim says:

      Tony Abbot confronted the rule of judges through the system, before going nuclear. The Trump whitehouse has been unduly compliant to the rule of judges, making it difficult to go nuclear.

      • Theshadowedknight says:

        It looked like he was going to go after the judges, then his point man on the lawfare front bent the knee to his enemies, and is too popular to replace. He is stuck with his legal McClellan in the form of Sessions. Sessions seems nice, but that is a problem. He needs to be harsh, not nice, and Trump cannot replace him without pissing off the base. He is pretty much stuck right now, and with friends like he has, who needs enemies?

        The Shadowed Knight

  5. John B says:

    I asked and it was given – that was fast!

    > His attempts to cut a deal…

    Well, there’s his problem. As you say, the enemy don’t do deals (and you further say they can’t). Though a brilliant candidate I think it’s clear by now that Trump didn’t know what he was getting himself into. I agree with Theshadowedknight, “This is coming to a fight.”

    In which case it’s time to prepare for being ejected from the public Internet. I suggest putting a .onion or .i2p address, or both, up on this site as a fallback.

  6. […] up from Jim is an update on Trump, with an observation that Trump is still not in power. Recall that Jim had predicted a Trump auto-coup in which Trump moves from merely ruling in name to […]

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